A Study Of Humor Translation In Liang Shiqiu 's

As a famous cross-cultural essayist, translator and literary critic, Liang Shih-chiu has written a lot of remarkable masterpieces. In order to better translate Chinese excellent essays and disseminate Chinese traditional culture, this thesis takes Ta-tsun Chen and Shih Chao-ying’s English version of From A Cottager s Sketchbook as examples to discuss the translation of humor in it.Firstly, the author does an analysis on the research of Liang’s humorous style and its translation; secondly, based on techniques of humor production, this thesis divides humor in From A Cottager’s Sketchbook into three parts, language humor, cultural humor and language humor with cultural elements. It applies many examples to do analysis on translation methods translators adopt, such as literal translation, substitution, annotation and free translation etc. In view of different types of humor, even for the same type, they have different translation methods. For complete same language background and universally acknowledged cultural elements, literal translation is the first and best choice; if not directly matched, they find some similar expressions and substitute the original meaning with them so as to achieve relative transmission; besides, for some specific culture-related language humor, they make use of literal translation plus annotation, retaining the language characteristics as possible; as for untranslatable or extremely difficult ones, translators abandon the form or humor to just try to convey the original meaning, helping clear obstacles for reading and avoid obscurity of translation. Certainly, these methods can be flexibly combined according to detailed situations.Thirdly, this thesis makes an interpretation of the translation of humor in From A Cottager’s Sketchbook from the perspective of culture and Aesthetics of Reception. From the view of culture, humor itself bears rich cultural information, cultural differences make the translation of humor a difficult problem. Translators take history, culture and language differences into consideration to apply appropriate translation methods in order to convey humorous elements in the original essay; from the viewpoint of Aesthetic of Reception, in the process of humor translation, translator plays the dual role of readers of the source language and the translation work. As the source language readers, translators exert their subjectivity on the basis of pre-understanding to draw their expectation sight with the original essay; as readers of translation work, they pay attention to target readers’cognitive psychology, language aesthetics and native culture and make use of effective translation methods to realize the utmost fusion between target readers and the original essay.At last, the research of the translation of humor in From A Cottager’s Sketchbook enriches the connotation of humor and its translation to a certain extent, it also makes great contribution to the cross-cultural transmission of Chinese excellent works.